From the archive: Up to 200 die as siege ends in mayhem

All that was left were the ashes. On the floor of the gym at Middle School No 1 yesterday lay the mangled, black detritus from Russia's worst hostage crisis. Corrugated iron roofing, loft insulation material, soggy wood and an endless black, unidentifiable mulch, still smoking.

It was a skeletal scene. Rescuers tore out the shredded window frames, ducking gunfire and grenade blasts, and firefighters drenched the beams that stood where a roof once was. A curtain fluttered in the wind. Children's drawings from their art classes could still be seen taped across windows. But there was no one left to walk out of the ruins. It is hard to believe that hundreds of women and children had been held in the gym.

An intricate series of wires, in which mines were strung between the gym's two basketball hoops and along its outer walls, had malfunctioned. When the militants fulfilled their unspeakable threat to blow themselves and their schoolchild hostages up if Russian troops stormed the school, only two mines went off.

Yet the damage was still immense in its scale and inhumanity, killing at least 150 hostages. Interfax news agency later put the toll at 200, quoting regional health ministry sources.

The intense firefight erupted at 1.05pm. Two huge blasts sounded out across the town of Beslan, sending families, officials and ranks of media into panic. It remains unclear what final spark unleashed the force of two sides practised at trying to extinguish each other.

One local official confirmed that emergency workers had been admitted into the schoolyard to collect the bodies of 20 men executed by the hostage-takers in the first few hours of the crisis. They had been dumped out of the windows of the second floor of the main school building.

The official said: "When the rescuers came to the bodies, a mine laid by the militants went off. And then the federal troops began the siege."

Other reports suggested that the battle flared after one of the hostage-takers, a woman with explosives strapped around her waist, unintentionally detonated the bombs, blasting a hole through the gym wall.

Ilfa Gagiyeva, 33, a local investigator trapped inside with her daughter Diana, 7, witnessed what happened inside the gym when the militants finally made good their threat to blow up themselves and the building if the Russian military stormed it.

"There had been shootouts all day between the terrorists and the troops," she said. "We were all undressed. It was like a sauna in there. No water or food and we were all burning up with fear."

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

Historic articles from the Guardian archive, compiled by the Guardian research and information department (follow us on Twitter @guardianlibrary). For further coverage from the past, take a look at the Guardian & Observer digital archive, which contains every issue of both newspapers from their debut to 2000 - 1.2m items, fully searchable and viewable online